|
Bird Flies the Coop: A Startup Social Enterprise Heads From MIT To Pakistan |
|
2008-05-13, 16:19 My fiancee's company, SaafWater, got a nice write-up by Xconomy, a website focusing on technology and business around the Boston area. Attention entrepreneurs: it isn’t always about the technology. Often the real innovation lies in the distribution or business model. Take the problem of providing clean drinking water in developing countries. The technology needed to make individual water supplies safe isn’t rocket science—it ranges from purifier packets of chlorine to special containers that use sunlight to kill microbes. Yet, across the globe some 2 million people die every year from drinking contaminated water, the vast majority of them children under 5. What’s more, every year there are 4 billion episodes of water-induced diarrheal disease, which causes malnutrition and makes kids miss school, with serious economic consequences and systemic effects on quality of life. In poor areas, boiling and refrigerating water often falls by the wayside because it consumes too much energy and time, and there are few, if any, alternatives. Enter Sarah Bird, a graduate student in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program and founder of SaafWater (pronounced “Soff”-water—saaf is the Hindi and Urdu word for “clean”). Her company is creating a distribution model for getting safe, clean drinking water to urban areas in developing nations. Her first stop: Karachi, Pakistan’s bustling capital city of 15 million....
Click here to the rest of the piece on the Xconomy site.
|
